


First, Dial 011

by Ferritin4



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Bodyswap, Humor, M/M, Mutual Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-07-20 06:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16131353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferritin4/pseuds/Ferritin4
Summary: There were good reasons Nicklas wasn’t in Russia, playing in the KHL. Nicklas knew Alex knew them, because he had told him a hundred fucking times.And yet.





	First, Dial 011

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glendaglamazon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glendaglamazon/gifts).



“Come on. Come out to Russia, Nicky. Come play.”

“No, Alex.”

 

* * *

  


“What you doing there anyway? Nothing. Come here. We play, we win. It’s gonna be good.”

“No, no — [laughter] — you think there is nothing I do but hockey?”

“I think there nothing you do so good. Come on. Come.”

“No, no. It’s okay.”

 

* * *

 

“KHL good this year. Lot of player from NHL, it’s gonna be great.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“Better if you here.”

“Alex. I’m busy.”

“How busy?”

“Too busy. Okay?”

 

* * *

“Niiiiiiiiicky.”

“No.”

 

* * *

“Nicky, you think maybe —”

“Alex, I can’t. I’m not coming.”

“What?! I don’t ask about KHL! How you think I can ask? You say no, I hear no.”

“You do?”

[pause]

“Don’t you dare say it now.”

“Nicky.”

“No. No, no no you don’t —”

“Now you mention, I do have important question.”

“[laughter]”

 

* * *

There were good reasons Nicklas wasn’t in Russia. Nicklas  _knew_  Alex knew them, because he had told him a hundred fucking times.

Alex thought Nicklas was one of his bros — 

“I’m not one of your… your bros, Alex.”

“No? No, you  _only_  bro in my life, Nicky.”

“[groaning]”

“Come on. When you coming here?”

— and Alex thought that if Nicklas came to Russia he’d have as much fun as Alex. Unfortunately, it was physically impossible for Nicklas Backstrom to have as much fun as Alex Ovechkin. His synapses would short out or something; it just wasn’t happening.

 

* * *

The problem with physical impossibility was that the connections between them all, the ley lines that coursed between all of the world’s major cities, those rivers of magic that cut through the earth like golden ribbons, those thick tendons of power joining everyone, bringing a little something extra to the earth, supplementing the soil and letting the humans planted on it thrive:

Those could move.

 

* * *

 

Thank fucking god Nicklas had his own phone number memorized.

 

* * *

 

“Alex! What you fucking did?! Did you — if you do this I’m gonna —”

_“Ty che, blyad?”_

“Alex!”

[pause]

“Nicky?”

“Of course Nicky! Who the fuck you think is? Whose body  _you_  wearing right now?!”

 

* * *

The ley lines shifted, but the rules didn’t. If you paid attention, your trainers could and would swap you on purpose and with your consent, but you couldn’t play hockey in another persons’ body. Obviously. It was dangerous to the person whose body you were in, since you didn’t know how to use it. It was dangerous to you yourself, given that any kind of head injury could made the transfer back difficult or significantly delayed.

Nicklas had swapped with Greenie twice, intentionally. He had swapped with two other centers in juniors, to moderate effect; it was interesting to feel another person’s muscle memory. It was not unlike when the trainers did memory loans: you felt the way someone else felt, layered on top of what you knew to be true. Someone else’s experience was relevant to you in a way it never had been before. Nicklas found it edifying, but not all-consuming. He could never forget that there were two people present when he was in someone else’s body, any more than he could forget that another person’s memories weren’t really his.

They were techniques. They were little things, tiny ways to get an edge. You never normally kept their body. You never normally  _kept_  their memories.

The ley lines could move, and normally, well. Fucking  _normally_  wasn’t always applicable.

 

* * *

Nicklas Backstrom was still not having as much fun as Alex Ovechkin.

“Your hair is so good, Nicky,” Alex was saying, probably while he made Nicklas’s hair stand out from his head like an angry hedgehog.

Nicklas  _felt_  like an angry hedgehog. He felt like growing fucking spines and flying back to the U.S. and stabbing Alex with them. This was unquestionably the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and he would like to make it the worst thing that had ever happened to Alex, too.

“Your hair sucks,” Nicklas said sharply. Alex made a grumpy, whiny huffing noise in Nicklas’s voice, and now  _that_  was the worst — every single thing was the new worst thing that had ever happened.

“You just wake up?” Alex said. “You wake me up. You were napping.”

Nicklas rolled over and pressed his face —  _Alex’s_  face — into the mattress and briefly considered suffocating himself.

“Nicky,” Alex said.

“I hate you,” Nicklas told the mattress with Alex’s face, extremely truthfully.

He hated this fucking mattress, and he kind of hated Alex’s face. He hated the feeling of being two people in one person, holding someone else’s phone with someone else’s hand while someone else talked to him in his own fucking voice and it just —

Alex hadn’t done it, or he hadn’t done it on purpose; they had established that. Deep down, Nicklas knew Alex wouldn’t do that to him: as much as he wanted Nicklas in Russia with him, getting Nicklas in Russia  _without_  him probably didn’t hold the same appeal, and neither of them was naïve enough to think that Nicklas could believably navigate in Alex’s body  _as_  Alex  _in fucking Russia._

This was the worst thing that had  _ever_  happened to him, Nicklas thought again. He knew six words of Russian and two of them were vulgarities. He was going to lie on this mattress until he starved to death, here in Alex Ovechkin’s bedroom in the giant house Alex lived in with however many of his own family members; yes, Nicklas was going to lie here until they called the police to break the door down and then he was probably going to throw himself out the window to get away from them.

His — Alex’s stomach rumbled. It was morning in Russia, and Alex’s body was hungry. Of course.

Ugh.

“Don’t say mean things,” Alex said in Nicklas’s voice. “You talk to mama yet?”

“What the  _fuck_ ,” Nicklas said, sitting bolt upright in horror, “why you think I’m gonna talk to your  _mother?”_

 

* * *

Alex’s mother was one of the many family members who lived in Alex’s enormous house —

“Not  _my_  house! It their house, Nicky. Why, you think they don’t have house before I come back?”

— and she was already awake and in the kitchen when Nicklas came downstairs wearing a threadbare t-shirt, too-short sweatpants, and her son’s body.

“She definitely knows there’s something wrong,” Nicklas whispered to Alex.

“Give her phone,” Alex said.

Nicklas held the phone out silently, and Mama Ovechkina snatched it away from him with a truly terrifying look on her face and launched into a torrent of Russian, at, near as he could tell, both of them at once.

Now Nicklas didn’t even have Alex to complain to, he thought despairingly. Now he was going to be yelled at in Russian, which he didn’t understand, by a woman who scared the living shit out of him on a good day, in a country he'd never been to, in a body that wasn’t his, and he didn’t even have the option of telling Alex how much it sucked.

 

* * *

Mama Ovechkina’s first step in addressing the ongoing events of the worst thing(s) that had ever happened (were happening) to Nicklas Backstrom was to feed him roughly nine breakfasts at once.

“No wonder you’re always hungry. This is normal meal for you?” Nicklas asked Alex, who was monitoring Nicklas’s breakfast experience over Skype. It was necessary, if awkward: Mama Ovechkina did not speak any appreciable amount of English, or Swedish, and Nicklas was not up to trying out his four socially-appropriate words of Russian on her.

Mama Ovechkina put down a plate of something red and gelatinous and gave him a look that didn’t seem all that socially appropriate itself.

“Does you mother hate me?” Nicklas said, trying and failing to suppress the urge to lower his voice. If Mama Ovechkina could understand him, then he wouldn’t be yelling his pathetically under-informed questions at a blurry depiction of his own face propped up against the vase of white flowers that Alex’s mother had set out on the table before she’d started feeding her son’s borrowed body its army of breakfasts.

“She like you fine,” Alex said, smiling out of Nicklas’s own face, talking with Nicklas’s own damned voice, and not even convincingly. Nicklas felt suddenly very, very tired.

“Sure,” Nicklas said.

“She like you fine,” Alex repeated. He said something to his mother in Russian which didn’t by any account seem to make her like Nicklas more, but it did get her say something back, then turn and go upstairs.

“We need to fix this before I have to go outside,” Nicklas said. “Or talk to anyone other than your parents.”

Some research, primarily in Russian and primarily conducted by Alex and his father, had indicated that it was extremely not allowed to secretly play a game in someone else’s body in the KHL. It was also moderately not allowed to swap bodies at all during the regular season in Russia, and Russian players previously in the NHL had to be very careful to declaim any interest in doing so. Two players had lost their contracts over purported body-swaps during training drills.

Nicklas had spared a thought for how strange it must be for KHL players to come over to North America and be confronted with a league that thought the whole thing was a great idea, but he didn’t really have time to dwell on cultural differences while he was still trapped in his teammate’s body in a  country where he didn’t speak the language or know anybody and now it was apparently a closely-held secret.

“I call my friend there, he’s careful. He won’t say anything. He’s doctor for this stuff,” Alex said. Nicklas blinked. 

“You _did_ call, or you will call?” he asked. How the hell had Alex been so productive? Nicklas hadn’t had time to do anything but want to sink into the earth, and then eat a pile of fried potatoes. Alex had evidently spent his evening reading the entire the KHL rulebook with his father and calling all his mental transference specialist buddies.

“I call already,” Alex said impatiently. “He think maybe he can do switch back, but never so far apart.”

“Well, I can’t come there,” Nicklas said. “I can have your mama say I’m too sick to play this week, but I can’t say I’m so sick I can’t play and then fly to America.”

“How I gonna go to you then? I look for your passport, Nicky. You don't plan trip to Russia,” Alex said, borderline judgmental.

“Just because I haven’t been doesn’t mean I wouldn’t ever want to visit,” Nicklas protested.

“Means you don’t have visa to come,” Alex said.

Right. Visas, which were necessary to travel internationally. Visas to Russia, where flying was a notoriously bureaucratic nightmare of an experience, and for which applications usually took longer than a week.

“Fuck,” Nicklas said. “I just… _fuck.”_

“Nicky,” Alex said. He sounded alarmed. “Nicky, it’s gonna be okay.”

No, it wasn’t. They’d found a solution that was pretty much impossible, because of a barrier that was pretty much  _equally_ insurmountable, and Nicklas had at best one week before people started speculating that Alex Ovechkin was either horribly injured, dead, cheating, or had clandestinely defected.

“How it’s gonna be okay?” Nicklas said. “You have my visa in your pocket or something? You have a magic wand that makes somebody go get you a visa, but don't tell anyone about it?”

“Oh,” Alex said, in tones of sudden revelation. Nicklas felt his stomach drop, if possible, even further.

“What,” Nicklas said with intense trepidation. “What ‘oh’?”

“Nicky, I got to go,” Alex said. “I call you after, okay? Gonna be couple hours.”

 

* * *

“Thank you,” Nicklas said to Mama Ovechkina when she next came into his orbit. “Uh. Spasibo, mama,” he tried. That was one of his appropriate words, after all. He could say ‘hello,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘my name is Nicklas,’ although he wasn’t sure the last one was even strictly true anymore.

Alex’s mother smiled, which made her look a lot less terrifying and lot more like Alex.

“Thank you,” she said, then reached out and patted Nicklas’s actual cheek. Was that a real thing that people did? No one had patted Nicklas on the cheek since he had been shorter that Mama Ovechkina was now. Anyway, thank you for what — “I know.”

Nicklas’s brain backed up and turned in circles a few times.

“Oh,” he said. _‘Thank you’; I know._ Right: she would know ‘thank you,’ even if she didn’t really speak English. After all, even Nicklas knew how to say thank you in a foreign language. As just demonstrated.

“Sorry,” he blurted out. This was the worst day that anyone had ever had, but at least now she didn’t look so incredibly furious with him.

“‘Sorry’,” she said, still smiling. “I know too.”

Nicklas stamped down on a helpless giggle. He had only been in Alex’s body for a maximum of ten hours — counting from the time he’d fallen asleep back in Washington DC, exhausted from trying to finish a conversation with his agent about what to do with his remaining time this season. His agent had been open to Nicklas joining a foreign league, although he’d been pushing for Sweden (national pride, probably) or a series of exhibition games (money, less _probably_ and more definitively). Nicklas hadn’t know what he’d wanted to do, except that he would have preferred a decision that resulted in not getting phone calls from Alex literally every single day explaining the appeal of the KHL.

Ten hours ago, he’d been thinking about whether he should just go ahead and sign up for the KHL, give in to his agent’s desires for a paycheck and his own desires for something to do — look, hush, he _had_ been busy, but now he was less so and anyway, _anyway:_ he’d been thinking about it.

If Nicklas was supposed to be learning a lesson from this, he didn’t know what it was. Be careful what you think extremely vaguely about? Be more decisive, so you don’t accidentally get thrown halfway across the world before you get a chance to make a choice on your own? Don’t play hockey, become a bookkeeper instead, and live out your life in Sweden where you belong, never having met Alexander Ovehckin or his scary mother or swapped bodies with anyone?

_Great idea,_ Nicklas though to himself. _A little late though._

“Ne volnuysya,” Alex’s mother said, but whatever that meant, Alex and Sasha Semin hadn’t accidentally taught it to Nicklas in the locker room. Nicklas just shook his head.

 

* * *

“Okay, Nicky, I fix.”

“You what?”

“You there, they think _I’m_ there. KHL season still going on, why would I leave? But we need to be in same place, to fix. Right?”

“I… yes. Probably.”

“‘Yes, probably’. Is right. So I call your agent, say now I think about KHL! I go to see Russia, go say hi to my friend Ovi from hockey. Sooner I go, sooner I sign contract, play more games. More games, more money.”

“You told him _what?_ Are you _negotiating a contract_ for me?”

“So he say okay, he get me flight fast. He get visa, no problem. Maybe big contract, big deal! They can make happen so fast.”

[pause]

“I know this, I’m Russian. Big enough deal, _anything_ happen, fast as you need. So I’m coming.”

“…Alex.”

“I’m getting on plane, now, Nicky. No problem. See you soon.”

 

* * *

The less said about getting Alex home from the airport the next morning, the better.

 

* * *

Actually, the less said about waking up in Alex’s body the next morning, the better, too. Nicklas had never had to stay swapped for more than five hours, and even then it had been awkward at times. Nicklas would like to say that waking up in Alex’s body, in Alex’s house, with Alex’s crampy shoulder and Alex’s morning wood and Alex’s disgusting morning breath was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, but if he was being honest with himself, he was starting to think he hadn’t seen anything yet.

 

* * *

“You do okay, Nicky?”

“What? Yes. Get in the car before someone tries to talk to me.”

 

* * *

Nicklas was officially the odd man out. He’d been extraneous enough when it had been him and Alex’s parents, but this, now? This was ridiculous.

He tried to go upstairs twice, but Alex wouldn’t let him. Seeing Alex in Nicklas’s own body was disturbing enough, and then Alex was speaking in a torrent of — understandably — Russian, which Nicklas had never heard in his own voice. He wondered how Alex would feel if Nicklas suddenly started spouting Swedish in Alex’s voice. Confused, probably.

Finally, they settled on a plan. Alex went to take a nap, and Nicklas went to take a shower in Alex’s body, which was just as terrible as Nicklas had thought it might be.

 

* * *

‘Terrible’ was kind of harsh. Upsetting? No; unsettling, maybe. Too much information? Simultaneously too much and too little information, and far, far too close for comfort. 

Alex’s body was something Nicklas had seen easily a thousand times, but he’d never _inhabited_ it. He’d never had to stand under the aggressively driving spray of Alex’s shower and feel the drops hit Alex’s skin, all around him, with Alex’s muscles beneath it. It was unnervingly equidistant between feeling like he was wrapping himself around Alex and feeling like Alex was engulfing him.

Unsettling, definitely. Unsettling and uncomfortable and a little bit overwhelming —

Yeah. Terrible.

 

* * *

Nicklas finished his slightly overwhelming shower, got dressed in Alex’s also slightly overwhelming clothing, and got a surprisingly simple rundown on the Ovechkins’ plan of attack. Their  mental transference doctor friend wouldn’t make it to the house until tomorrow, and then, hopefully, he could figure out what it would take to reverse the change — Nicklas was willing to part with a lot of money, or sacrifice a goat, as needed — and then Nicklas could go home.

That last item on Nicklas’s personal to-do list sounded… cruel, laid out like that. Obviously he wanted to go home; Alex hadn’t missed that Nicklas was appalled and alone and fairly agitated about the whole Welcome to Russia and to Your New Human Form experience, but the hurt tone of Alex’s voice when he’d lit into Nicklas about not having a visa: that was new.

Alex was well aware that Nicklas would never, ever, ever ever _ever_ have done this on purpose, but it was becoming increasingly apparent to Nicklas that maybe that wasn’t the part that stung.

Whatever it was, the new vague guilt and residual vague unsettled feeling combined disastrously to prompt Nicklas to say _okay_ instead of _no are you insane_ when Alex suggested that since they had some time to kill, they should go out for dinner.

 

* * *

Alex took them to a place where, according to Alex’s extremely enthusiastic review, they could partake of the best food in the entirety of Russia, and nobody would know either of them. It was almost empty apart from two old men and a waitress who looked like she hated them both, a lot. Nicklas couldn’t tell if Alex was lying about the anonymity or telling the truth, but it certainly didn’t _look_ like anybody gave a shit about them.

Watching Alex in his own body was very nearly as discombobulating as being in Alex’s; Nicklas was sure he’d never made half those faces in his life. There Alex was, feeling everything he always felt, unstoppable and ridiculous, and using Nicklas to do it.

Nicklas was so fascinated by Alex’s emotions on his own face that he didn’t make any effort to keep track of how much Alex was drinking, until Alex went to tilt his chair back onto two legs and fell directly onto the floor.

“Oh my god,” Nicklas said, staring dumbfounded at the space where Alex used to be.

“What, fuck,” Alex slurred from the linoleum where he’d probably dented Nicklas’s skull. If Alex Ovechkin broke Nicklas’s body before he gave it back they would have _words_.

“Sorry,” Nicklas told the waitress, throwing money on the table and dragging Alex to his feet. “We’re leaving.” How did you say ‘we’re leaving’ in Russian? Well, actions spoke louder than words. Also, now that he was in a larger body than Alex was, he could just pick Alex up and carry him out the door.

“Happy you here,” Alex said in a very drunk voice as they made it to the sidewalk.

“Happy I’m here too,” Nicklas said distractedly. Alex was now shorter than him but still very dense, with the leaden bones of the profoundly inebriated. It was going to be hard to get him all the way home.

Additionally — “Give me your phone,” Nicklas said. They’d been dropped off here by a family friend who Nicklas was sure would come right back if they called and told him something coherent. In Russian. Nicklas was really hoping Alex had some coherent Russian left in him.

“Are you?” Alex said, rummaging around in his jacket with all the direction of a raccoon in a trash can.

_There!_ It was right there! Nicklas grabbed Alex’s wrist and took the phone out of his breast pocket for him. “Am I what?”

“Happy,” Alex said. He blinked owlishly at Nicklas. “Happy you here.”

Oh. Was he? He wasn’t — this was the first time since he’d woken up in Alex’s body that he was sure that this exact moment _wasn’t_ the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Maybe he’d simply gotten used to the sensation of constant existential dread and body dysphoria.

“I’m happy we have a plan,” Nicklas told him. “Call your friend, he gotta come get us.”

“You happy you can go home,” Alex said, but he did start scrolling through his phone, and as far as Nicklas could tell from reading the screen upside-down and in Cyrillic, that was a contacts list.

“I never said I’m going home,” Nicklas protested weakly. Alex gave him a surprisingly sharp glare and held the phone up to his ear.

Somebody picked up, and Alex regaled them with an extended diatribe that Nicklas really hoped was just a long-winded way of saying _come out here right now it’s cold and my teammate’s body can’t hold its liquor_.

“Okay,” Alex said finally, hanging up. “He coming.” He looked around, and then sat down on the curb.

Nicklas stared at him for a second, then followed suit. So what if he got street grit on his pants? These weren’t even his pants. These were Alex’s jeans, and street grit couldn’t possibly make them more ugly.

“I’m not going home right away,” Nicklas told him. He wasn’t sure why; obviously he was going home at _some_ point. It seemed harsher to just admit that, though, and Nicklas thought — well, he didn’t know. Was this softening the blow? Why was there a blow in the first place? His going back to where he lived shouldn’t hurt Alex’s _feelings_.

It did though. It was. Alex was wearing a softly miserable look on Nicklas’s face, and somehow, Nicklas was, in fact, hurting his feelings.

“Okay,” Alex said.

“I got to stay for a few days, anyway,” Nicklas said. “You tell my agent I want to see KHL, so maybe I’m going to come to a game. Watch you play.”

Nicklas wasn’t holding out for enthusiasm, but he wasn’t expecting the blank look that washed over Alex’s face, or for Alex to turn away.

“Alex?” Nicklas said. “Are you listening?”

“Yeah. You gotta stay for few days,” Alex said. “Okay.” He leaned gently onto Nicklas’s arm, and then, in the span of seemingly four seconds, fell asleep, leaving Nicklas sitting on a curb in someone else’s body with a maudlin drunk sleeping on him, waiting for a ride home from someone he couldn’t even talk to.

_Now_ Nicklas was having as much fun as Alex Ovechkin.

 

* * *

The Ovechkin family’s  mental transference specialist friend was six foot five with a ratty black beard as long as Nicklas’s forearm. Both of his eyebrows were pierced, and he had a scar on his left hand in the shape of a large X. Nicklas’s initial knee-jerk, uncharitable thought was that he might be Rasputin; on further examination, there was really nothing to contradict that possibility.

_You know what? Fine_ , Nicklas thought. He was willing to work with Rasputin if it got him his own body back.

“How old is he?” Nicklas found himself whispering to Alex, as the reanimated corpse of Russia’s most famous mystic shook hands with Alex’s parents and put his bag down on the dining room table.

Alex frowned at him. He was surprisingly not the worse for the immense amount of vodka he’d drunk, and Nicklas wondered if the mysterious power-up Russians got around defying hangovers was somehow stronger in Russia itself.

“Forty, maybe?” Alex said quietly. “Don’t know for sure.”

He did not look forty. Nicklas wasn’t completely sure what age he _did_ look, but forty was not it. Nicklas shot Alex a skeptical look, for which he was rewarded by an elbow in his ribs.

It was Nicklas’s mistake, really; he should have sat farther away from Alex if he was going to cast aspersions. They were sitting side by side on the sofa, watching as Rasputin IV began to deliver some kind of lecture to the Ovechkins in Russian. So far the doctor had come up equal parts weird and accommodating, and given their situation Nicklas probably ought to do him the respect of at least looking like he was paying attention.

“What is he saying?” Nicklas whispered, leaning into Alex’s side. Alex stared intently at the doctor and made no move to acknowledge that Nicklas was even in the room, let alone still talking.

Alex’s mother turned and glared at him, and Alex sighed.

“He say it hard to have happen,” Alex whispered back. The doctor opened his bag and laid out a circle of metal, and then a plastic bag of half-smoked cigarettes, and then what looked unpleasantly like a bird’s nest made of fishbones.

“No shit,” Nicklas whispered sharply. “He thinks we don’t know that?”

“No,” Alex said, “he mean we have a hard time make happen. Hard to make switch, even with magic current changing.”

“We?” Nicklas said, horrified. “ _We?”_

Alex sighed again, looking away, and Nicklas has been sure, _so_ sure, that Alex had been telling the truth when he said he hadn’t done this, but if he had —

If he had, what? Nicklas was here, now, and he was about to be in his own body. And he _had_ been thinking about the KHL, or at least about seeing Alex again. How mad would he be, if Alex had done this? How mad _could_ he be?

Alex shifted away and turned to face Nicklas, while the doctor worked at the table like some macabre magician.

“He just mean, we have to want,” Alex said. “Even then, it hard. Have to want, to make change. Too much.”

“I didn’t want to swap bodies with you!” Nicklas hissed. “I didn’t even want to come here that badly! I was only _thinking_ about it!”

“You think about it?” Alex said softly.

Nicklas blinked at him, his mouth opening and then closing on nothing.

Alex wore Nicklas’s face like makeup, not like a disguise. He wore his own emotions completely, no matter what skin he was in, and Nicklas had never thought he would see that expression in his own eyes.

“You wanted me to be in Russia so bad we swapped bodies?” Nicklas said.

“I ask you every day, Nicky,” Alex told him, like he was stupid, and maybe he was.

 

* * *

The swap back was somewhat anticlimactic, in light of the revelation that Alex had _wished_ Nicklas five thousand miles and into a different body, just to get him to come visit.

When Nicklas opened his own eyes to see Alex’s face looking back at him, his first thought, as the Ovechkins cheered and Rasputin IV started putting his tools away, was that there was no way he was going home now.

 

* * *

It felt like they should celebrate, like Nicklas should call his mom and tell her the good news. Except, of course, they hadn’t told anyone.

“We can have party,” Alex teased when Nicklas voiced his ridiculous thoughts; Alex seemed to have gotten whatever spark back with the reacquisition of his own body, and now he was sprawled out over two-thirds of the couch in the Ovehckins’ rec room, with a bag of licorice on his lap.

“I think you partied enough yesterday,” Nicklas complained. Alex had made it look like everything was hunky fucking dory, but Nicklas’s body felt, generously, like shit.

He was folded up in the remaining space between Alex’s head and the arm of the couch. He would have eaten some of Alex’s licorice on principle — he could reach it — but he hated it on a normal day and now he was worried it would make him want to throw up.

“Sorry,” Alex said. He sat up. “You want?” He handed the bag over. Nicklas stared at him. He had never in his life willingly eaten licorice, much less with a hangover.

“Ugh, no,” Nicklas said, right before he got a good look at Alex’s face and realized that Alex was deliberately mocking him.

He was hung over, but he wasn’t too hung over to push Alex onto the floor, or get into a slap fight with him, or forget that was once again smaller than Alex and fail, badly, to pin him.

Nicklas ended up with Alex sitting on him, Alex’s face, his real, actual, Alex Ovechkin face, looming over Nicklas as he blocked out most of the light with his shoulders. Nicklas had a very unfortunate flashback to the shower, and the sensation of being _engulfed_ by Alex.

He must have made a face, or looked at Alex the wrong way, because Alex’s eyes widened.

“Nicky?” Alex breathed. He looked more confused than besotted, and oh, look: Nicklas didn’t need licorice to feel like he was going to throw up. “Nicky,” Alex said again, much more alert.

“Sorry,” Nicklas said, cringeing ineffectually backwards into the floor, “I’m sorry —”

Alex reached out and caught Nicklas’s hand, and then, astoundingly, brought it up to his lips, to kiss Nicklas’s first knuckle.

“You sorry?” he asked.

“No,” Nicklas told him, pulling him down.

 

* * *

The rec room couch was long enough for even Alex Ovechkin to stretch out fully. It was almost wide enough that Nicklas could fit next to him, if they arranged themselves correctly.

 

* * *

“Wake up. Wake up, Alex. Come on.”

“No.”

“Alex, it’s good news. Wake up.”

“Nicky?”

“Of course Nicky. Who you think? Just think you might wanna know, I finish my own contract negotiation.”

“…you sign contract?”

“My agent knows I’m looking. And I heard KHL was going to be good this year. Lots of players from the NHL, somebody told me about it.”

“Very good this year. Win a lot.”

“Hm. Maybe you have a good team already.”

“Better now you here.”


End file.
